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The truth is that many business owners find it quite difficult to manage business finances while running their small businesses. Over the past couple of weeks, months or even years, the task may have felt overwhelming to you. However, since your business cannot succeed without sound financial management, it’s important to always take advantage of any measures or hacks that can help you become more meticulous about your finances. To help you out, here’re the top financial tips you should consider while running your business today.
Work with a qualified accountant
Having a good accountant by your side is one of the best ways to keep your finances in order. They can offer you invaluable insights into your business finances, and help you avoid costly mistakes. When you do that, you can expect some of the more complex financial tasks like tax filings to be an absolute breeze, and be able to handle other business matters with a clearer mind. Just remember that hiring a good accountant doesn’t mean keeping off your business finances. You still need to maintain control by overseeing things.
Avoid procrastination
Have you been putting off your bookkeeping tasks? If you have, then now is the best time to change. Many business owners put off various financial management tasks for many reasons. Sometimes, you may find yourself procrastinating because you have many other things that require your attention.
Unfortunately, putting off accounting tasks only creates bigger problems, and eventually, you find yourself having to deal with a bigger mess that you have to sort out at some point. The best way to avoid procrastination is by breaking down the financial tasks into small categories and handling each one of them at a time until you’re done. When you do that, financial management can become more manageable and prevent the likelihood of procrastinating.
Take measures to prevent fraud
According to an Association of Certified Fraud Examiners report, your business may lose about 5% of its revenues to fraud if you don’t take the necessary measures to prevent that from happening. One of the best measures to take to prevent fraud is to adopt an instant bank account verification method to ensure that funds are going or coming from valid bank accounts. More precisely, having the verification method can help you ensure that your customers are providing the right banking details, and that they’re not involved in any fraudulent activity. This can help you avoid costly returns and payment reversals that can easily compromise your merchant account status.
Secondly, practice internet awareness and take serious measures to protect your computer systems. Among other things, this means ensuring all your computer systems have the most current anti-virus software programs and firewalls. Take your employees through the various forms of cyber-attacks, such as phishing schemes that cyber-criminals use to harvest valuable information from computer users, to protect your employees’ and general business information. Such measures can help your company avoid costly losses and a damaged reputation.
Take a finance class
If you feel like you’re not well-versed with financial management, you can take advantage of the countless online classes that teach the fundamentals of business finance. There are many online websites that provide the important business finance courses, such as budgeting and how to use finance software. When you take classes and become better at handling accounting software, for instance, you can be more proficient at overseeing your business’ accounting functions even if you outsource tasks to an accountant or bookkeeper.
Assess your seasonal cash flow
At any given time, you need to understand your seasonal cash flow and how it affects your business – to keep your business in top gear. Your cash flow can give you a feel for how your business is doing, including when your revenue is slow, so that you prepare properly. As you can imagine, knowing when your business growth is slow in a good time can assist you build a cushion to keep your business afloat during the tough times.
Conclusion
Finances are an integral part of running a small business, and making sure you manage them properly is a major step towards success. To get started, simply, assess your seasonal cash flow, take measures to prevent fraud, take a finance class if necessary, avoid procrastination and hire a qualified accountant.